Initial impressions of Amazon Fire TV after ordering with Prime shipping. Discusses Amazon's open platform approach allowing any content provider versus Apple's walled garden, noting Fire TV supports 1080p resolution while existing Apple TV is limited to 720p, making Amazon Fire TV attractive upgrade despite existing Apple ecosystem satisfaction. Initial impressions of Amazon Fire TV after ordering with Prime shipping. Discusses Amazon's open platform approach allowing any content provider versus Apple's walled garden, noting Fire TV supports 1080p resolution while existing Apple TV is limited to 720p, making Amazon Fire TV attractive upgrade despite existing Apple ecosystem satisfaction.

An introduction to Amazon Simple Workflow Service for coordinating distributed application components. Explains decider and worker roles, task-based workflow execution, reliability features like retries and timeouts, and provides Ruby code examples for registering workflow types and processing tasks.

Demonstrates combining Amazon SQS queues with SES email service for background email processing. Shows architecture where web applications queue email jobs, worker processes consume from SQS and send via SES, with code examples in Node.js and Ruby handling queue messages and email sending.

Ruby example using Amazon Web Services SDK to publish messages to Simple Notification Service topics. Demonstrates getting SNS interface, finding topic by ARN, and publishing messages which can be delivered as SMS or emails, perfect for form-based notifications in Ruby applications.